The elephants, tearing apart a bale of hay, appeared ancient beyond all computation, infinitely patient, infinitely weary. Out of the sudden crimson that stained the east a ray of sunlight flashed like a pointed, accusing finger and rested on the garish, gilded bars and tarnished fringe of the cages; it hit the worn and dingy fur of an aged, gaunt lioness, the dim and bleared topaz of her eyes blinking against the flood of day; it fell upon a pair of lean wolves trotting in a quick, constricted circle; upon a ragged hyena with a dry and uplifted snout; upon a lithe leopard with a glittering, green gaze of unquenchable hate.
“Take a hold,” a husky voice had urged Anthony; “help the circus men put up the big tent, and get a free pass.” In the contagion of work he had pulled upon the hard canvas, the stiff ropes that cut like scored iron, and held stakes to be driven into the slushy sod. Thin shoulders strained against his own, gasping and maculate breaths assailed him. The flesh was tom from a man's palm; another, hit a glancing blow on the head with a mall, wandered about dazed, falling over ropes, blundering in paths of hasty brutality.
Anthony rested with aching muscles in the orient flood of the sun. The tent was erected, flags fluttered gaily aloft, the posters of the sideshow flung their startling colors abroad. A musical call floated upward from an invisible bugle: an air of gala, of triumphant and irresponsible pleasure, permeated the scene. “She's all right, isn't she?” Alfred Craik demanded at his side. He nodded silently, and turned toward home, his pulses leaping with joy at the dewy freshness of the morning, the knowledge of Eliza--a sparkling, singing optimism drawn from the unstained fountain of his youth.
LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf--at a super-union scale--for his mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade. From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the swirling stream--“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”